Tag: Greg Kihlström

Marketing Operations: Strategy, Implementation, and Optimization of Marketing Teams, Processes, and Platforms by Greg Kihlström offers a practical framework for leaders seeking stronger alignment, governance, measurement, and operational maturity

AI is working its way through the buyer’s journey. The 2025 holiday season saw a 693% jump in AI-driven traffic from the previous year, as customers are increasingly relying on AI-based chat interfaces to help them in the initial search and discovery process for all manner of things, from…

Recent research from Forrester, Gartner, and HBR converges on a hard truth: the AI transition in marketing has moved past experimentation — and most teams aren’t ready for what comes next. Forrester’s Brian Hopkins identifies the core failure: we’re tracking prompts run and content generated, not pipeline influenced and…

This week’s research from HBR, Forrester, and MarketingProfs paints a clear picture: the CMOs winning with AI aren’t the ones with the most tools — they’re the ones who’ve redesigned how work actually gets done. Meanwhile, Forrester is projecting that 3 in 10 enterprises will actively damage customer experience…

AI in marketing is moving faster than the organizations deploying it. Agentic AI is already making autonomous decisions in campaign optimization, personalization, and media buying, but most marketing teams don’t yet have the governance structures, accountability frameworks, or operating models to manage that reality. The tools are ahead of…

This week’s intelligence from Gartner, Forrester, Braze, and Salesforce tells a consistent story: the organizations winning with AI aren’t the ones with the most tools — they’re the ones that have solved the unglamorous prerequisites. Clean first-party data. Clear human-AI decision boundaries. Brand governance that scales. Without those foundations,…

This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. We’re experiencing a conflict between the economic pressure to produce quick and cheap research results and the scientific demand for rigor. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lifelike personas can be generated within minutes by vendors promising strong results. But these…

Have you ever shipped an AI capability that looked great on launch day, then quietly started making your customer experience worse, one “personalized” suggestion at a time? This is the part of the AI story that rarely shows up in vendor demos. A model can be well-designed, thoroughly tested,…

Recent from Gartner, Forrester, and Salesforce converges on a single uncomfortable truth: the AI investment cycle is entering a reckoning phase. The hype-to-reality gap is widening, and CMOs who haven’t built the operational infrastructure to support AI at scale are now facing compounding disadvantages — not just in efficiency,…

AI investments are actively reshaping the infrastructure of how we engage customers, how buyers discover brands, and how martech platforms compete. Forrester’s Q1 2026 CDP Landscape confirms that agentic AI is poised to transform customer data platforms from data middleware into autonomous engagement engines. Their Experience Optimization Landscape shows…